Category: Law and Humanities

H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) revitalized the field of jurisprudence in much the same way Rawls’ A Theory of Justice gave new impetus to political philosophy a decade after. A Concept of Law presented a new theory of law blending arguments from the philosophy of language and previous versions of positivism. (Rawls himself claimed to have gotten the idea of proceduralism from Hart. See A Theory of Justice, p. 48) But as is often the case, a theory needs an adversary to reveal its deepest implications. This adversary came first with Lon Fuller’s “Positivism and Fidelity to Law”, a rebuttal to Hart’s essay “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (both 1958), and then with a series of essays by Ronald Dworkin published successively as Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and Law’s Empire (1986).

Hart’s positivism argues roughly that law and morality are at least separate in the sense that law cannot be reduced to morality. This means that we can study law scientifically without getting involved in disputes about substantive questions concerning the good. But since it is clear that in order to be obeyed, laws ought not merely to rely on force, laws require some source of authority which can only come through deliberation. Such deliberation, however, is need not be moral but can be thought of as merely normative. Hart holds that the authority of the law is provided by rules of recognition: these are secondary or meta-rules which specify the authority of law derived from particular social practices. A rule of recognition, for instance, is that, in the United States, laws are passed by congress according to a certain procedure. This specifies the way the law receives its authority but not what the law is (which is a matter of primary rules).

Much of the debate surrounding Hart’s theory has been about whether the rule of recognition could indeed do without moral support, that is, whether the separation of law and morality could be maintained. Dworkin, as Fuller had argued before him, contended that the rule of recognition could not be normative without also being moral because, in the case of legal interpretation for instance, the law will need to be extended to deal with difficult cases (a point Hart vacillated on). Extending the law can only be done through recourse to extra-legal principles of controversial political morality or policy, not already specified by law. So law is not free standing after all.